| Movie Review of "A Beautiful Mind" Given the box office performance of this movie and the media coverage it attracted for all sorts of reasons, including, but not limited to, its Best Picture win at the 2002 Oscars, I�m pretty sure all of you have seen this movie, or at least heard about part of it enough to care to read this. Therefore, spoilers abound, and they explode like landmines. Beware! The movie opens at Princeton University in the 1950s. Of course, everyone is wearing ugly clothes. It�s the 1950s, people. Some students are in a room listening to some professor give an introductory speech. They all look like me, that is, they all look like young university students. Anyway, sitting in one corner, and looking both like a total loser as well as a 40-year-old hobo who just limped into the room from the streets, is Russell Crowe, who�s playing John Nash in this film. His fat ass ably supports him in this challenging role. Naturally, he�s wearing the dreariest clothes of them all. Because, say it with me, he�s a loser. Cut to some tea party on the lawn. John takes some glass and fiddles with it, and wow, someone just scored a nomination for Best Director. John makes some comment about how some tie looks ugly, and everyone laughs. Clearly John forgot to look at his own clothes. Pot. Kettle. Black. John meets Charles, his �room-mate�, who is actually his hallucination. They talk, push a desk out of his room, and have drinks together. They�re buddies. It�s quite easy to tell that Charles is John�s hallucination, because we all know how plausible it is that some hip, bed-hopping English student will be best friends with a weird, reclusive mathematician. It doesn�t happen in the real world, so we�re given a clue this early on in the movie. John is also friends with some other mathematicians, who all do not look as geeky as the mathematicians I know. Poor me. Anyway, they�re all making great findings in the field of maths, while John just scrawls on glass and follows the path of birds. His friends poke fun at him, but they actually really like him, for some reason which is never really made clear. Perhaps he�s just the one in the group that everyone pokes fun at, just because. John tries some awful pick-up line in a bar, and gets slapped in the face. Yeah, that sort of thing happens all the time. Puh-leeze. This is the 1950s, the woman would probably just walk away silently. Soon, John makes this ground-breaking discovery in game theory, and goes on to win some scholarship placement. He excels in his work, teaches classes, and basically falls in love with his student Alicia, played by the ravishingly beautiful Jennifer Connelly. Check out her eyes. She�s all pretty, I know, but, look at those eyes. Right, review. All through this, he�s actually hallucinating about working for some secret government operative, trying to trace messages from Russia sent through newspapers and magazines. I think halfway through this the aliens actually take over the planet, but John Nash thankfully recovered before that happened. So he goes about doing all this �secret� work, and one day at some conference, some psychiatrist comes to try and help him. But John runs. Run, Russell, run! He gets caught, and is questioned about all this �secret� work. Charles is in the office with him, but he is John�s hallucination. But the movie makes it sound like it�s some secret conspiracy thing, and that Charles was a mole or something. It�s rather suspenseful if you didn�t know anything about his life, but the suspense eventually goes nowhere, because the schmaltz somehow takes over at the end. So John gets hospitalised, Alicia finds out the truth and finds it hard to cope. John goes through that therapy thing where they basically electrocute you. Shock therapy, I think they call it. He survives, and comes out of it reciting poems. Kidding. He actually then thinks he�s gay. Anyway, the Nashes try to piece their lives together again. They have a son too. John decides to stop taking his medication, and his �friends� start returning. He retreats to a garden shed, and starts studying Morse code from the aliens again. One day, Alicia goes out to collect the laundry, leaving John to bathe his boy. Um, literally. Get your mind out of the gutter. She comes across said shed, plastered with Newsweek and Time articles with lots of red circles around certain letters and words, and runs to the house in time to save her son from being drowned. She gives up, calls the doctor, and is about to re-institutionalise John, when someone gives some �moving� speech and they decide to try again. They somewhat succeed, slowly. And the movie does convey that slowness, because round about this time, my bum actually gave up � blood was no longer flowing to my ass. The movie was that long. And the seats were that uncomfortable. Let�s wrap it up, shall we? John returns to Princeton, and tries to find work. His friend from those university days, still looking 20 years younger than John Nash himself, gives him a job. He screws it up, then tries again. He succeeds, and starts teaching, and starts interacting with actual people. One day, some old man comes round wanting to give him the Nobel Prize in Economics for his initial groundbreaking work on game theory. John Nash kills him because he thinks he�s hallucinating. Nah, kidding. He actually eats him for lunch. They head to some tea room, and lots of people place their fountain pens in front of John, as a symbol of respect. It�s all very contrived. Cut to the Nobel Prize ceremony. Having never ever seen a Nobel Prize ceremony in my life, I�ll have to assume that they actually do give speeches at these things. John Nash recites some poem, and gets cut off halfway by the masters of ceremonies, so then John takes out a gun, kills the MC, and then kills himself. Wait, I must be hallucinating that in the cinema. John Nash receives the award, gives another �I really deserve the Oscar� speech, and pays tribute to Alicia his dearest. It�s much too sugary sweet for my liking. All�s well that ends well. Triumph over adversity, this is the stuff of Oscar glory. R.D.�s Rating : It�s a good movie, but it doesn�t get beyond PUPPY DAWG goodness in my book. (What�s a PUPPY DAWG? Check out R.D.�s rating system here.) Sound off!! Did you feel that not enough screen time was devoted to Jennifer Connelly�s eyes? Was Charles really annoying or just plain annoying? Was Russell Crowe's ass bigger than a pumpkin or just about the same size? Did you think he was cheated of his Best Actor Oscar? Tell me here. |